Curt Doolittle

Form: Mini Essay

  • What Love About Ashkenazi Genetics – But What Does It Mean? It’s pretty simple:

    What Love About Ashkenazi Genetics – But What Does It Mean?

    It’s pretty simple: verbal acuity persists into the lower classes, whereas verbal acuity in my people seems to decline quickly in the lower classes. The ability to observe mental projection and narrate it at the same time is just so common in that gene pool. And it seems to persist through substantial outbreeding.

    Its just so much EASIER to talk to someone in ANY class if they have the ashkenazi gift of language. They have much higher verbal comprehension and much higher empathic comprehension than their white peers. And as the depth of cooperation increases (the size of the economy) this talent increases in value. (even if the talent for deceit increases as well). Outlier genetics produce outliers in all directions remember.

    It’s very different from the East Asians. They lie and cheat like — like always — but they are terrible at it. And they have no ability to use verbalism to rally and lead. So aside from the fact that they’re more racist than we can imagine (that’s a good thing), they are not disruptive or difficult to organize with. You do not want an asian lawyer, and I would be very nervous about an asian accountant, but an asian engineer or employee is almost always a good thing – especially for those of us who like to heap praise on good performers, because they’re so damned appreciative of it. Our heritage as egalitarian warriors does not facilitate our complimenting subordinates all the time. (I love working with the Japanese and the Russians. )

    Here in Ukraine, and especially here in L’viv, which was at one point very close to the capital of Ashkenazi civilization, (as a border protectorate under the governance of greater powers – or a ghetto at greater scale with a better economy because of it, or a crusoe’s island) we have a LOT of people with minority jewish heritage (just as Afghanistan does by the way). And you notice it here as much as I notice it in america. If you can get a catholic with minority Ashkenazi genes that convey that verbal ability it seems to produce pretty interesting results. So as I’ve said for a long time now, the jews have been ‘capturing’ superior genes for a long time the same way we have been creating them through constant hard work.

    Lack of jewish artistic creativity is equally obvious for reasons I understand both culturally (art is a moral commons) and genetics (visualization). But not just here – everywhere. And a lot has been written about it both by westerners and jews. And we still see it in the dominance of (immorally biased) jewish script writers and financiers, and (morally biased) christian designers, actors, and directors. And the dominance of jews in pornography, comedy, and pulp, and the dominance of christians in the moral (horror/scifi) and high arts. And perhaps it is an unfair comparison given western excellence at physical creativity. Just as it is unfair to compare other cultures to jewish verbalism. But genes express themselves in culture and in our commons. Jews are overrepresented in every criminal field perpetuated by verbal means, and every deceit field (academia, media and press) just as they are overrepresented in a few non-criminal fields (hard science). Why is it that the jewish people are so excited by scamming and free-riding and that whites are so excited by production? (Thats just data. Don’t kid yourself. i work with data. If you haven’t got a LOT of data, then you don’t know what you’re talking about.)

    And this ability – the ability to introspectively narrate experiences versus introspectively construct visualizations is what provides the interesting utility of our cultures (races) to one another.

    So I’m stuck on this issue of mutual accommodation. I know that it is possible to eradicate jewish cultural immoralism through the application of incremental suppression by outlawing untrue, unwarranted, immoral (parasitic) speech in matters of the commons. I know that it is possible to outlaw the Talmud and the Koran (and possibly the bible) if they propose competition to law, versus competition to spirit. Both the Talmud and the Koran are objectively immoral books, with objectively immoral laws. And as books of law they are not as is christianity, a book of wisdom but a book of commands. And as such are not religions but competing political systems. The west was reliant upon natural law before the church gave it a name. It is the law of our indo european ancestors.

    I suspect that a verbally articulate ashkenazi underclass over represents itself dramatically because the competition in that underclass is non-existent from the host. They are natural leaders of the underclasses by the simple virtue of putting sentences together. The west has eradicated those people from our own polity if they ever existed. This leadership ability creates a long term problem for the western ethic that unconsciously tests verbal ability for ‘rank’. Where we must convert to judging moral action and conformity as rank insulated from eugenic suppression.

    To do that we must know objectively what immoral and moral, true and false statements are, so that we can prosecute immoral and false statements such that a culture predisposed through indoctrination, culture and genetics, to verbal criminality (specialization in parasitism and free riding by various acts of fraud and entrapment) finds the incremental suppression of their ability more costly to contend with than to engage in productive and moral activity despite their ‘feminine’ group reproductive strategy.

    So I am fairly sure that the demand for truthful and moral speech in matters of the commons is sufficient to eliminate the abuse of verbal ability just as westerners have limited our excellence at martial ability (we’re heroic, we don’t run, and most importantly we hold formation and act as one – and there is some sort of awareness of where we are in space that allows us to act in concert more readily).

    I don’t know however how frustrated that population would become if they had to find alternative means of income, or if like women whose strategy the Ashkenazi have exaggerated to perfection, whether they cannot help it and will represent a constant problem to our civilization.

    Our great experiments at the underclasses, catholics, jews and women, and now third world underclasses, has been a failure. We assumed that western man’s truthfulness (science) and natural law was a universal if given voice. This is not true.

    Mankind evolved fastest wherever the incremental suppression of free riding was most active. Man PACIFIES the universe, including himself.

    We pacified women first, then our underclasses, then competing civilizations.

    When we stopped pacifying we lost.

    Back to pacification.

    Back to paternalism.

    Source date (UTC): 2016-01-06 04:43:00 UTC

  • JUSTICE VS MORALITY VS LAW? IT STUMPED SOCRATES, BUT SHOULDN’T – THE ERROR OF ID

    JUSTICE VS MORALITY VS LAW? IT STUMPED SOCRATES, BUT SHOULDN’T – THE ERROR OF IDEAL TYPES OVER SPECTRA

    The terms Justice, Morality and Law refer to spectrums, not states, and that is why the subject is confusing to people when it should not be.

    Natural Law (logically necessary), customary law (evolved), legislation (commands), and regulations (insurance)

    vs

    Objective morality (logically necessary), customary morality (evolved), normative reality (practiced), moral theory (advocated)

    vs

    Objective Justice (logically extant), Evolved Justice (unintended), procedural Justice (intended), subjective justice (imagined)

    Humans evolved instincts for managing the extreme value of cooperation.

    Moral instincts prevent free riding and therefore preserve the incentives to maintain cooperation.

    Justice instincts do the opposite: they tell us if our cooperation has been accounted for. Cooperate requires sacrifice (payment) and rewards (returns).

    Law is the means by which we resolve differences between positive moral action, and individual perceptions of justice.

    That this is simply an accounting system provided for by evolution so that we preserve the incentives to maintain the extraordinary benefits of cooperation is somehow… well, depressing.

    So morality is the positive and negative instinct. Justice is the sense of whether morality has been preserved in the face of violation and law is the logical means by which we resolve disputes.

    The reason that it’s confusing is that while necessary morality, justice and law are logically decidable, as information becomes less visible and less ‘correct’ opinion’s differ.

    Some cultures solve this through authority. Westerners solve it through jury. But to solve it by jury requires a largely moral people. which is why some cultures have juries and other cultures have three judges to make bribery more difficult.

    Source date (UTC): 2016-01-06 01:33:00 UTC

  • CULTURAL OBSERVATIONS: LOVE IN THE EAST Now, after living here three years, I un

    CULTURAL OBSERVATIONS: LOVE IN THE EAST

    Now, after living here three years, I understand what my Ukrainian and Russian friends have been warning me about Ukrainian and Russian women, but that they couldn’t quite put into words.

    It’s both good and bad. Or maybe it’s not bad, just different.

    In my generation, in the states, we became wealthy enough that the family is no longer an economic unit, but an emotional one: you marry for recreational compatibility, and for psychological compatibility. You marry for friendship.

    And we have been ‘sorting’ (See “The Big Sort”) for a long time now, into regions and castes. Hence my prediction (not terribly hard, insightful or unique) that America will both divide and develop into castes like south america and india for the simple reasons of abandoning european household traditions, and drastically importing underclasses.

    So what we americans see is retention of the practice of marriage in the upper classes where the economic benefit is great, and the disposable income to enjoy each other is great, and we see abandonment of marriage in the lower classes where the economic benefit is limited, and the disposable income to enjoy each other is limited – (and frankly, where the other person isn’t always enjoyable.)

    But the net is, I grew up in a world where the relationship takes precedent, and personal intimacy is the highest ambition. This is higher on Maslow’s pyramid of wants needs, but like higher economic velocity, is more fragile than economic wants and needs.

    Now women here in the east (like the men) have visible ‘survival values’. Visible low-trust. Visible short term horizons. Even if they are moral. Even if they are sweet girls deep inside, their value system is that they should be married by 22, have children by 25, and if by 30 they don’t they’re old. And the outnumber their men due to unemployment, alcoholism, illness, emigrating for work. Worse, it is ‘normal’ for husbands to cheat on their wives here either frequently or occasionally, and western men just tend not to so – and consider it a failure if they do. Worse, domestic violence is common and expected. I have (I’m not kidding) had a woman try desperately to make me violent with her. Which given the history of my father and mother I’m just not going to let happen – ever. I couldn’t understand it other than it was expected.

    So for a woman in the east, the world is a very different place from the west. Family (meaning children and relatives and friends) provide emotional support, economic insurance, and men are disposable, and unreliable, and emotionally expensive resources. They love you just fine – within the limits of their abilities and traditions and expectations. But they don’t love you like a western woman does: as your best friend, the person you depend on for everything, and the person you trust most in the world. They don’t have the luxury or the tradition for it.

    And this has given me some consternation, because I absolutely love the culture here and feel that in many ways it is so much better than the nonsense culture we have in the states. Western men are so much better than eastern men, but we are constantly demonized by the feminists. Eastern men are terrible by contrast but they are never demonized. You see and hear from mature men everywhere in society here. Whereas the media in the west is constructed for youth and women to the exclusion of men. To no small degree, white men read. Women and children watch advertising.

    But once you have had a woman who is your best friend, the love of your life, and total personal intimacy of interwoven souls all women in the east seem — somehow loveless. More feminine. More beautiful. Better mothers. But not soul mates.

    Now I am making a broad generalization with the realization that women can’t avoid cognitive solipsism. And one of my closest friends is Russian and he and his wife DO have that level of intimacy. But they live in America also. So like any topic where we compare entire categories such as race and gender (yes ladies I know your brains have a hard time with this), we see distributions. But it is still possible to make observations about tendencies in distributions.

    Lesson is that we have exchanged the durability of the marital relationship in the west for the luxury of greater EARLY intimacy that improves over time. Whereas in the east they still practice economic and familial mating, in the HOPE that intimacy evolves over time. In our world individuals matter more to both man and woman, and in their world the family matters more to the woman, and it appears, less so to the men.

    Marriage is necessary for the construction of commons. Because men are dangerous creatures. We all pay costs of creating a civilization and marriage turns out to be one of them.

    I love being married. I love women. But I love her friendship more than anything else. Where you can discuss every bit of each other’s souls, and work to make each other happy and fulfilled. There is nothing like it. I can find a family easily. I can find sex easily. I can find income easily. I cannot find my closest love and friend easily. Despite the fact that in my view, I can love nearly anyone I find even moderately attractive.

    Feminine intimacy is to some degree the ultimate good. I just did not realize that it was a luxury good. Or that it was not a universal preference. Or how significant a difference in relationships had occurred in the west as the result of our wealth.

    Economics in everything.

    Curt Doolittle

    Source date (UTC): 2016-01-04 02:56:00 UTC

  • WHY ARE WOMEN’S COMMODITIES OFTEN MORE EXPENSIVE THAN MEN’S (HINT: WASTE) Market

    WHY ARE WOMEN’S COMMODITIES OFTEN MORE EXPENSIVE THAN MEN’S (HINT: WASTE)

    Marketing and Advertising tend to reflect fictions not truths. Prices tend to reflect truths not fictions. For counter-intuitive price differences, find a way for human behavior to explain why a given price is true. (This is operationalism, or what we call incentives.)

    Women display higher sensitivity when selecting purchases. There are evolutionary reasons for women doing so. Men display lower sensitivity when selecting purchases . There are evolutionary reasons for men to do so. In all products that cater to women companies require greater variation in product lines. Fashion in particular. And in all product lines companies experience greater losses. Ergo, women’s products are more price-perishable.

    The fact that it’s difficult to sell to women, yet women dispose of most income, creates a lottery effect. Much of this lottery effect encourages entry into the market for women’s products. Women benefit from this lottery, both in discounts on goods and on greater variety of goods. Suiting their greater discretion.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-12-27 01:40:00 UTC

  • IQ AND EUGENICS As far as I know, there are something on the order of 80 differe

    IQ AND EUGENICS

    As far as I know, there are something on the order of 80 different agencies that contribute to the experience we call ‘mind’.

    As far as I know, and as far as the research seems to indicate, “G” or ‘general intelligence’ is an attempt to measure DEMONSTRATED intelligence, when it was found (and still remains) that people who did better on intelligence tests, do better in every dimension of testing, and also, in every dimension of LIFE.

    Now Aggregates (Averages), are necessary for us to make general statements, but aggregates launder interesting noise. So while it may be true that people with higher general intelligence excel at pretty much everything, that does not ALWAYS mean that some people are capable in niche functions of which there are 80. However, what appears to be the case, is that IQ reflects DEMONSTRATED intelligence remains very consistent in all walks of life.

    THE PSYCHOLOGY OF OBJECTIONS

    Most of what we see from objections to IQ are either differences in rates of maturity (girls feel smarter than boys at certain points in development because they mature faster), Dunning-Krueger effects (which are optimistic biases necessary for an acting organism’s survival), or fear demonstrations of denial, (“I will be left behind”), or solipsisms (inability to separate the self from general statements about humans – necessary for raising children). The people who practice denial are demonstrating fear and that is all.

    Most of this problem in society comes from the transition of polytheistic individualism that seeks utility in the , to monotheistic, idealistic, collectivism that seeks sameness.

    Hence my preference for market government and polytheistic orders, so that each of us feels good finding a niche rather than feel bad if we are not the top 10% in our class.

    THE VALUE OF EUGENICS

    As far as I can tell, the spatial (modeling), and verbal (observing, ordering and describing the the model), are sufficiently correlative with demonstrated intelligence that these two factors are accurate predictors of nearly all areas of life.

    And those that are not, are due to patience and discipline – which is why westerners have and easterners have been so successful: culling the impulsive, and pressing discipline and patience into the lower classes which nearly always are a drag on society other than providing labor and serving as armies with which to hold land.

    Eugenics can take positive (enhancement) or restrictive(limiting or prohibiting reproduction), or negative(culling by killing or hanging) strategies – or all of the above.

    And it is probably the most important commons that we can construct.

    Propertarianism: Since all ‘goods’ are known by exchange, my solution to the problem of eugenics is merely to do the opposite of what we do now: pay unproductive people not to have children, or to have only one child, and punish them if they do otherwise.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-12-25 05:43:00 UTC

  • This Week’s Aspie Post: The Process Of Maturing Your Mind

    [T]HIS WEEK’s ASPIE POST Aspies tend to love everyone. The difficulty in empathizing, common rejection, and desire for connection with others makes all successful connections more enjoyable. The hard part to manage comes in three: 1) It’s hard to find relations since listening to others most of their language consists of signals we consider either meaningless, tedious or confusing. So you must learn patience to listen and try to ask about how and why people feel the way they do. Most of us understand spoken emotions. Meanwhile the autistic impulse tries to control you into avoiding exactly what you are trying to accomplish. This is why ssri’s are so effective: they dull the impulse and allow you to practice building the strength of will over the autistic impulse. Social anxiety disorder is controlled by the same means. We must see the autism spectrum as excess in-uterine suppression of the growth of the self. And that we must assist the growth of the self to compensate. We tend to think as engineers today rather than gardeners and foresters. The mind is constructed more like a tree and some artful bonsai may be needed. 2) It is easy to alienate relations via over sharing minutia fascinating to the autistic mind because system-thought provides constant touch stones amidst sensory chaos in socially and emotionally dense environments. So developing self monitoring is necessary and it’s very hard work. Again the problem is severity: some of us are weakly affected and can rely on will. Others more so and require help in training. Others need chemical assistance to suppress the autistic impulse. And some of us lack sufficient self to imagine the very idea of self monitoring – and it is those people that are non functional. 3) Once you mature having not experienced all the “silly” distractions of normal minds, you can gain this sense of superiority that comes with expertise in anything, and you can lose your desire to engage with (boring, dull, stupid) normals. This requires acceptance that only comes with age: normals have different feelings and needs and they usually fail to mature intellectually as far as we do – or rather they stop maturing at much earlier ages. So the only technique I have developed is love. I keep working a problem in my head in order to keep the big black scary machine busy, and I merely enjoy the company of people like a warm bath or sunny day. But what has surprised me is that simple and good people do not engage in as much signaling with false intellectualism. So I prefer the company of common people for my emotional health, and the company of competitive and intellectual people for my mental health. So how do we socialize? The trick for us is to develop something we can share with others that is interesting. So that we are valuable to the conversation. My strategy is to seek to help everyone I encounter in some small way. This usually involves getting to know them while looking for some opportunity to assist. And in that act of inquiry I show interest in others: seeking to understand, not to agree. That’s my lesson for this week to aspies.

  • This Week’s Aspie Post: The Process Of Maturing Your Mind

    [T]HIS WEEK’s ASPIE POST Aspies tend to love everyone. The difficulty in empathizing, common rejection, and desire for connection with others makes all successful connections more enjoyable. The hard part to manage comes in three: 1) It’s hard to find relations since listening to others most of their language consists of signals we consider either meaningless, tedious or confusing. So you must learn patience to listen and try to ask about how and why people feel the way they do. Most of us understand spoken emotions. Meanwhile the autistic impulse tries to control you into avoiding exactly what you are trying to accomplish. This is why ssri’s are so effective: they dull the impulse and allow you to practice building the strength of will over the autistic impulse. Social anxiety disorder is controlled by the same means. We must see the autism spectrum as excess in-uterine suppression of the growth of the self. And that we must assist the growth of the self to compensate. We tend to think as engineers today rather than gardeners and foresters. The mind is constructed more like a tree and some artful bonsai may be needed. 2) It is easy to alienate relations via over sharing minutia fascinating to the autistic mind because system-thought provides constant touch stones amidst sensory chaos in socially and emotionally dense environments. So developing self monitoring is necessary and it’s very hard work. Again the problem is severity: some of us are weakly affected and can rely on will. Others more so and require help in training. Others need chemical assistance to suppress the autistic impulse. And some of us lack sufficient self to imagine the very idea of self monitoring – and it is those people that are non functional. 3) Once you mature having not experienced all the “silly” distractions of normal minds, you can gain this sense of superiority that comes with expertise in anything, and you can lose your desire to engage with (boring, dull, stupid) normals. This requires acceptance that only comes with age: normals have different feelings and needs and they usually fail to mature intellectually as far as we do – or rather they stop maturing at much earlier ages. So the only technique I have developed is love. I keep working a problem in my head in order to keep the big black scary machine busy, and I merely enjoy the company of people like a warm bath or sunny day. But what has surprised me is that simple and good people do not engage in as much signaling with false intellectualism. So I prefer the company of common people for my emotional health, and the company of competitive and intellectual people for my mental health. So how do we socialize? The trick for us is to develop something we can share with others that is interesting. So that we are valuable to the conversation. My strategy is to seek to help everyone I encounter in some small way. This usually involves getting to know them while looking for some opportunity to assist. And in that act of inquiry I show interest in others: seeking to understand, not to agree. That’s my lesson for this week to aspies.

  • Actually, I’m Not An Atheist

    (important piece) (on the existence of gods)

    —“You’re one of my favorite Catholic Atheists”—

    [W]ell, thank you. Although, while a scientist, I am not an atheist. I am just what is called a Naturalist, and not a Supernaturalist. I understand that Gods exist. They exist as numbers exist. If I was an atheist you wouldn’t catch me praying (talking to god) regularly. Which I do. Often. I just have a very esoteric concept of the nature of a god’s existence. And I separate the existence of gods from primitive notions of religion. I am not sure what the difference is between a supernaturally existential deity, and a worldwide knowledge of socrates, or a regional knowledge of a saint, or a local knowledge of ancestors, and praying to the knowledge of that personality, and those memories, for love, support, advice, and counsel. For various reasons I am fairly certain prayer ‘works’. I am fairly certain gods ‘work’. I am fairly certain that gods, ritual, and prayer are a competitive advantage. And whether one chooses to explain away all of this scientifically as psychology, or accept it metaphysically, or embody it supernaturally, is merely a function of one’s abilities, biases, and preferences. As far as I know gods exist as numbers exist, and gods ‘work’ for the same reason numbers work. There are consequences to the existence and use of numbers that transcend human abilities to perceive and conceptualize. If you construct various axioms, the resulting patterns can be rich sources of information – especially when combined with new experiences. If you construct stories of gods, heroes and saints there is no difference. So as far as I know, the study of gods, heroes and saints literally reconstructs them in your mind, and you can ask them questions if you learn how. It is even more useful to do the same with one’s ancestors since you carry not only those ideas but their genes, and the biases and benefits that they passed down to you. Our ancestors thought in physicality or spirituality because they did not have the concept of INFORMATION that is the model we use today to understand the physical world. And it is INFORMATION that economists, philosophers and behaviorists such as myself use as the model for describing the human world, and not spirituality or physicality. I have no idea if information in my head, yours, and others, interacts in some quantum fashion. I can’t state it one way or the other. I suspect that if it does it is so subtle that it is only accessible to us in periods of self honesty. But if in fact the information in our heads creates synchronicity when we are subject to similar stimuli then that would produce an equal effect. So either way it is irrelevant. It just works. And group prayer or ritual would construct new axioms and biases and produce similarly synchronous knowledge in all of us. Now religion – as in a ritualistic group gathering – is something else altogether because the repetition of ritual, the submission to the throng, and the gregariousness we fell to the pack, all of which are present in the church or temple, produces a profound feeling of safety similar to that felt by our animal cousins when running with the herd or pack. It is this feeling we call ‘spiritual’ or ‘submission’: it’s a mild euphoria that spiritualists seek to amplify through practice. And it is one of the most universal and desired feelings of mankind. Combining this experience of mild euphoria with knowledge of gods, heroes and saints produces a form of honesty within the self that we cannot produce by other means. It is this clarity or honesty that gives religions their power. We can, if we pray, or contemplate, use the mythological structure of information, along without our existing knowledge, to find solutions – too seek and obtain answers as ‘insights’. And at worst we can find comfort in the throng. (Which we now overload with consumption until we realize it is meaningless, and that we have been deceived – if not drugged – by commercial information.) As yet we do not know how to produce the same effect as religion and prayer by any other means. I suspect I know how to do it. The question is whether it is possible to provide sufficient incentive to train enough people to do it to cause a reformation of the methods by which we teach every generation the Christian Discipline of Love into something more modern. I struggle with this problem and it’s probably the hardest problem I’ve tried to solve. And that’s saying something…..

  • Actually, I’m Not An Atheist

    (important piece) (on the existence of gods)

    —“You’re one of my favorite Catholic Atheists”—

    [W]ell, thank you. Although, while a scientist, I am not an atheist. I am just what is called a Naturalist, and not a Supernaturalist. I understand that Gods exist. They exist as numbers exist. If I was an atheist you wouldn’t catch me praying (talking to god) regularly. Which I do. Often. I just have a very esoteric concept of the nature of a god’s existence. And I separate the existence of gods from primitive notions of religion. I am not sure what the difference is between a supernaturally existential deity, and a worldwide knowledge of socrates, or a regional knowledge of a saint, or a local knowledge of ancestors, and praying to the knowledge of that personality, and those memories, for love, support, advice, and counsel. For various reasons I am fairly certain prayer ‘works’. I am fairly certain gods ‘work’. I am fairly certain that gods, ritual, and prayer are a competitive advantage. And whether one chooses to explain away all of this scientifically as psychology, or accept it metaphysically, or embody it supernaturally, is merely a function of one’s abilities, biases, and preferences. As far as I know gods exist as numbers exist, and gods ‘work’ for the same reason numbers work. There are consequences to the existence and use of numbers that transcend human abilities to perceive and conceptualize. If you construct various axioms, the resulting patterns can be rich sources of information – especially when combined with new experiences. If you construct stories of gods, heroes and saints there is no difference. So as far as I know, the study of gods, heroes and saints literally reconstructs them in your mind, and you can ask them questions if you learn how. It is even more useful to do the same with one’s ancestors since you carry not only those ideas but their genes, and the biases and benefits that they passed down to you. Our ancestors thought in physicality or spirituality because they did not have the concept of INFORMATION that is the model we use today to understand the physical world. And it is INFORMATION that economists, philosophers and behaviorists such as myself use as the model for describing the human world, and not spirituality or physicality. I have no idea if information in my head, yours, and others, interacts in some quantum fashion. I can’t state it one way or the other. I suspect that if it does it is so subtle that it is only accessible to us in periods of self honesty. But if in fact the information in our heads creates synchronicity when we are subject to similar stimuli then that would produce an equal effect. So either way it is irrelevant. It just works. And group prayer or ritual would construct new axioms and biases and produce similarly synchronous knowledge in all of us. Now religion – as in a ritualistic group gathering – is something else altogether because the repetition of ritual, the submission to the throng, and the gregariousness we fell to the pack, all of which are present in the church or temple, produces a profound feeling of safety similar to that felt by our animal cousins when running with the herd or pack. It is this feeling we call ‘spiritual’ or ‘submission’: it’s a mild euphoria that spiritualists seek to amplify through practice. And it is one of the most universal and desired feelings of mankind. Combining this experience of mild euphoria with knowledge of gods, heroes and saints produces a form of honesty within the self that we cannot produce by other means. It is this clarity or honesty that gives religions their power. We can, if we pray, or contemplate, use the mythological structure of information, along without our existing knowledge, to find solutions – too seek and obtain answers as ‘insights’. And at worst we can find comfort in the throng. (Which we now overload with consumption until we realize it is meaningless, and that we have been deceived – if not drugged – by commercial information.) As yet we do not know how to produce the same effect as religion and prayer by any other means. I suspect I know how to do it. The question is whether it is possible to provide sufficient incentive to train enough people to do it to cause a reformation of the methods by which we teach every generation the Christian Discipline of Love into something more modern. I struggle with this problem and it’s probably the hardest problem I’ve tried to solve. And that’s saying something…..

  • The Principle of Exchange Makes Philosophy Much Easier

    [P]olitical Philosophy is a lot easier when you just start from the premise that all goods are hypothetical, all bads are not, and that the only means of accumulating the knowledge to determine good from bad is exchange. This eliminates the fallacy that any of us know what is in fact good for all, other than institutions that allow us to choose any possible good but prohibit us from pursuing any known bad are a de facto good by prohibiting bads. This is contrary to human cognition because we evolved for negotiating cooperation not truth telling. It is contrary to human desire, because we desire consensus. It is contrary to political incentive because it limits political power. We all think we are ‘right’. But the only ‘right’ we can know is trade. Just as the only way we know whether we engaged in production or engaged in waste, consumption, or entertainment, is if others trade for what we create. Information and volition tell us what ‘right and wrong’ do not.